Tag: Trump White House

Mulvaney seeks to correct quid pro quo remarks in withering interview with Fox’s Chris Wallace

The Hill logoActing White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney insisted he never said the Trump administration expected a quid pro quo linking U.S. aid to Ukraine to Kiev launching investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden during a withering interview on “Fox News Sunday” with Chris Wallace.

Mulvaney repeatedly insisted his remarks at a Thursday press conference were taken out of context, saying he never used the language of “quid pro quo.”

“That’s not what I said. That’s what people said that I said,” he told a skeptical Wallace early in the interview.

View the complete October 20 article by Justine Coleman on The Hill website here.

White House staggers after tumultuous 48 hours

The Hill logoThe White House is slumping into the weekend after one of the most difficult 48-hour periods in President Trump’s tumultuous term of office.

Wednesday and Thursday produced a slew of damaging headlines for an administration battling an impeachment push by Democrats and a revolt by Republicans over the president’s handling of foreign affairs.

If all that wasn’t enough, the White House also announced long-anticipated plans to hold the next Group of Seven (G-7) summit at a Trump-branded property in Miami, dismissing criticism that doing so would raise emoluments issues.

View the complete October 19 article by Morgan Chalfant and Brett Samuels in The Hill website here.

Trump advisers and DOJ enraged by Mulvaney remarks; Pelosi puts no timetable on impeachment inquiry

Washington Post logoWhite House and Justice Department officials were angered Thursday after a combative news briefing by acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney in which he insisted President Trump did nothing inappropriate, but seemed to confirm that Trump’s dealings with Ukraine amounted to a quid pro quo.

Mulvaney later said that his comments were misconstrued and that no conditions were put on releasing military aid to Ukraine.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) refused to put a timeline on the impeachment process, declining to say whether she agrees with the assessment of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) that the House would vote by Thanksgiving, setting up a Senate trial late this year.

View the complete October 17 article by Colby Itkowitz, Felicia Sonmez and John Wagner on The Washington Post website here.

An avalanche of confessions: Trump’s chief of staff just admitted a stunning amount of wrongdoing on live TV

AlterNet logoActing White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney adopted a new approach to President Donald Trump’s war on impeachment in a Thursday press briefing: admitting a gigantic amount of wrongdoing in one sitting and daring Republicans to care.

The avalanche of confessions began in the White House briefing room, where Mulvaney revealed that the United States will host the upcoming G7 summit of world leaders at Trump National Doral in Miami, the president’s own Florida resort.

This is a grotesquely corrupt move, and the White House knows it. Even if, as Mulvaney claimed, the Doral was the best possible location for the G7 in the country — a ridiculous assertion — it would still be incumbent on the administration to choose another location to avoid the appearance of corruption and the reality of a conflict of interest. Mulvaney claimed that, all things considered, Trump decided he would “take the hit” of accusations of corruption. But it’s not just Trump who “takes the hit,” it’s the entire federal government, and the United States itself, that gets stained with corruption, and that’s a condemnable choice to make.

View the complete October 17 article by Cody Fenwick on the AlterNet website here.

Mulvaney Says, Then Denies, That Trump Held Back Ukraine Aid as Quid Pro Quo

New York Times logoConflicting comments by the acting White House chief of staff threw Washington into turmoil.

WASHINGTON — Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, threw the Trump administration’s defense against impeachment into disarray on Thursday when he said that the White House withheld nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine to further President Trump’s political interests.

Mr. Mulvaney told journalists in a televised White House briefing that the aid was withheld in part until Ukraine investigated an unsubstantiated theory that Ukraine, not Russia, was responsible for hacking Democratic Party emails in 2016 — a theory that would show that Mr. Trump was elected without Russian help.

The declaration by Mr. Mulvaney, which he took back later in the day, undercut Mr. Trump’s repeated denials of a quid pro quo that linked American military aid for Ukraine to an investigation that could help Mr. Trump politically.

View the complete October 17 article by Michael D. Shear and Katie Rogers on The New York Times website here.

Mulvaney walks back comments tying Ukraine aid to 2016 probe

The Hill logoWhite House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said Thursday that the flow of security assistance to Ukraine was not conditioned on Kiev investigating a theory related to 2016 election interference, walking back statements he made earlier in the day.

Mulvaney issued a statement Thursday afternoon accusing the media of “misconstruing” his earlier remarks to the press at the White House “to advance a biased and political witch hunt against President Trump.”

“Let me be clear, there was absolutely no quid pro quo between Ukrainian military aid and any investigation into the 2016 election,” Mulvaney said. “The president never told me to withhold any money until the Ukrainians did anything related to the server.”

View the complete October 17 article by Morgan Chalfant on The Hill website here.

Energy Secretary Rick Perry offers Trump his resignation

Axios logoEnergy Secretary Rick Perry informed President Trump on Thursday that he is resigning, Bloomberg first reported and Trump later confirmed. Perry’s exact departure date is unknown, but Trump told reporters it would be “at the end of the year” and that he has already picked a successor.

Why it matters: While Perry has largely avoided the kind of controversies that have plagued Trump Cabinet officials like Scott Pruitt and Ryan Zinke, he has recently found himself embroiled in the Ukraine scandal currently at the heart of the House’s impeachment inquiry. Perry told the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday that he was directed by President Trump to seek out Rudy Giuliani to discuss the president’s concerns about alleged Ukrainian corruption.

  • The House Intelligence, Foreign Affairs and Oversight committees have subpoenaed Perry to turn over documents by this Friday as part of their investigation into Trump’s alleged efforts to push Ukraine to investigate 2020 candidate Joe Biden.
  • State Department official George Kent told House investigators on Wednesday that the White House removed the core of its Ukraine policy team in the spring and replaced it with “three amigos” — Perry, Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland and special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker — who were viewed as more open to pressuring Ukraine.

View the complete October 17 article by Zachary Basu on the Axios website here.

White House Ordered Pentagon To Ignore Congressional Subpoenas

President Donald Trump and members of his administration have been telling employees of the federal government to defy subpoenas coming from House Democrats in connection with their impeachment inquiry, which is probing Trump’s July 25 phone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. And according to one of the Democratic leaders of the inquiry, House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, those employees include people in the U.S. Defense Department.

Schiff, according to Defense News, said that Defense Secretary Mark Esper had agreed to comply with a subpoena but was “countermanded.” And Schiff said of Esper being pressured to defy a subpoena, “the case for obstruction of Congress continues to build.”

Despite the Trump Administration urging federal government employees to defy subpoenas from the House, some of the people subpoenaed have testified before the House anyway — including Fiona Hill (formerly Trump’s top adviser on Russia-related matters) and Marie Yovanovitch (former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine).

View the complete October 16 article by Alex Henderson from AlterNet on the National Memo website here.

Ex-Pompeo adviser tells impeachment investigators he was ‘disturbed’ by attempts to enlist foreigners to hurt Trump’s political opponents

Washington Post logoMichael McKinley, a former senior adviser to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, told House impeachment investigators Wednesday that he quit his job last week out of concern about the mistreatment of career U.S. diplomats and the alarming allegations related to efforts to pressure Ukraine’s president into investigating President Trump’s political rivals.

“I was disturbed by the implication that foreign governments were being approached to procure negative information on political opponents,” McKinley said, according to portions of his testimony obtained by The Washington Post. “I was convinced that this would also have a serious impact on Foreign Service morale and the integrity of our work overseas.”

The remarks represent a significant rebuke of Trump’s dealings in Ukraine, from a senior official who worked closely with Pompeo and served as a link between the top diplomat and the rest of the Foreign Service. Trump has denied that he withheld diplomatic engagement and military assistance to Ukraine in order to pressure the country into investigating former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter, who worked for a Ukrainian energy company.

View the complete October 16 article by Carol Morello and John Hudson on The Washington Post website here.

Mulvaney emerges as a key facilitator of the campaign to pressure Ukraine

Washington Post logoIn late May, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney organized a meeting that stripped control of the country’s relationship with Ukraine from those who had the most expertise at the National Security Council and the State Department.

Instead, Mulvaney put an unlikely trio in charge of managing the U.S.-Ukraine account amid worrisome signs of a new priority, congressional officials said Tuesday: pressuring the fledgling government in Kiev to deliver material that would be politically valuable to President Trump.

The work of those “three amigos,” as they came to call themselves — diplomats Gordon Sondland and Kurt Volker, plus Energy Secretary Rick Perry — has come to light in recent days through newly disclosed text messages and the testimony of government witnesses appearing before an impeachment inquiry in Congress.

View the complete October 15 article by Greg Miller, Josh Dawsey and Greg Jaffe on The Washington Post website here.